MONTREAL — Jason Rosenblatt, the new artistic director of KlezKanada, wants to bring eastern European Jewish music to the people, to smaller, more heimish venues where it was meant to be played.

Shtreiml founder Jason Rosenblatt, left, is the new artistic director of KlezKanada, headed by founder Hy Goldman, right.

Rosenblatt, a founding member of the klezmer band Shtreiml, has been assigned by KlezKanada founder and chair Hy Goldman to expand the organization’s activities and presence in Montreal, and to develop both promising young artists in the genre and audiences that will appreciate it.

This is a new position (part time for now), reflecting Goldman’s longtime desire to expand the KlezKanada brand beyond the week-long summer program in the Laurentians, now in its 14th year. New York-based klezmer musician Jeff Warschauer remains the artistic director of that program, which is held at Camp B’nai Brith every August.

Rosenblatt’s vision is to hold regular klezmer concerts throughout the year in the city – not big annual fundraisers, but shows in more intimate clubs, priced within reach of just about everybody.

The first of these is April 1 when Shtreiml and Rosenblatt’s wife Rachel Lemisch’s group Yuran Asov Brass Fabulous perform April 1 at Parc des Princes on Park Avenue.

He’s also exploring the possibility of offering introductory klezmer sessions in Jewish and perhaps other schools. He is proposing to explain the history of the music and then play it, in the hope of “sowing the seeds of interest” in children in an art form that goes back centuries and is inextricably linked with Yiddish culture.

Rosenblatt also plans to organize after-school coaching for budding klezmer players. Workshops for up-and-coming ensembles have already begun at the Ben Weider Jewish Community Centre.

For the past few years, Rosenblatt has been living on and off in Philadelphia, where he taught in the city’s Young Audiences series, intended to acquaint schoolchildren with music they might not otherwise be exposed to.

Talks are also underway to work with the (McGill) Ghetto Shul – whose rabbi, Leibish Hundert, is a musician – to organize weekly jams in conjunction with KlezKanada to reach a university-age crowd.

Greater visibility of KlezKanada in Montreal might encourage more local promising artists to apply for its camp scholarship program, or younger families who enjoy listening to the music to attend the camp together, Goldman believes.

Both Rosenblatt and Lemisch are “alumni” of KlezKanada’s scholarship program, which has grown to encompass 100 recipients each summer, from pre-teens to young adults, from around the world, including a strong contingent from the former Soviet bloc.

Rosenblatt, who plays the harmonica and piano, first came to the KlezKanada camp in 1997 when he was 24. “I was not really into Jewish music at the time. I was playing blues in bars.”

He returned on a scholarship for three years, and then became a junior and, finally, a full faculty member in 2003.

He met Rachel, from Philadelphia, at KlezKanada in 2001, and they were married three years later.

Lemisch is a trombonist, and her band plays traditional Moldovan klezmer in the style of the late German Goldenshteyn,  who died three years ago. Shtreiml, which has performed in the United States and Europe, plays a lot of original music that can be described as a fusion of traditional eastern European music with a rock beat.

Although big galas are out, KlezKanada is by no means financially stable. It operates out of space provided by the Bronfman Jewish Education Centre, but otherwise receives no financial support from Federation CJA or any other community organization or governmental body or corporation. It relies on private funding from a variety of individuals and foundations.

A year-to-year struggle for survival has the upside of allowing KlezKanada to remain autonomous, Goldman said.

After April, the next show is planned for June at the Divan Orange on St. Laurent Boulevard and will feature Toronto-based Beyond the Pale, whose leader, Eric Stein, is another former KlezKanada scholar and is now artistic director of the Ashkenaz festival in Toronto.

Among the other notable klezmer musicians who have come up the ranks of KlezKanada are Josh Dolgin of Montreal, Michael Winograd of New York, and Russian-born Alex Kontorovich, who plays with the Klezmatics and Klez Dispensers.

“They are part of a new echelon of klezmer musicians who are well-established and are replacing some of the older ones. This has always been the vision of KlezKanada – to be an incubator for a new generation of artists,” said Goldman.

KlezKanada is also taking the music of European Jewry to the Quebec public at large. Last year alone, it was represented at Montreal’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, the St. Jean Baptiste parade, and Quebec City’s 400th anniversary celebrations.